September 29, 2008

When I saw The Dark Knight, I was, as a result of Christopher Nolan's reinterpretation of the Joker, compelled to make comparisons with Tim Burton's Batman. I had fond memories of Batman, whose haunting Gothic landscape had embedded itself in my dreams, but they were hazy memories, and I couldn't recall whether it really stacked up in any way to the latest version. I was sure that Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker eclipsed Jack Nicholson's, but what, exactly, was wrong with Nicholson's? Was it entertaining in its own right?

I've revisited the earlier movie and am a little disappointed. Batman is watchable, yes, but it's not the visual feast I remember. Its Gotham City is an impressive, moody metropolis, but the majority of the film takes place indoors -- in Bruce Wayne's mansion, which never seems quite as large as it ought to; the newspaper office of girl reporter (er, I mean serious photojournalist) Vicki Vale, who also has a major scene in her posh apartment; and, during the climax, a stagy belfry. My memory had every scene playing out in front of Gotham's magnificently dark, craggy skyline, but there are, in fact, only a handful of really good shots in the movie. There are, furthermore, two striking visual failures, each involving one of our hero's vehicles: the Batmobile, whose voice-activated shields look like products of MS Paint, and the Batwing, which brings to mind one of Ed Wood's flying saucers and even pops into outer space to form an impromptu Bat-Signal before its crash landing on the steps of a miniature model of Gotham Cathedral, with Hot Wheels parked outside. Of course, nothing in the city looks real, but the skyscrapers have a seductive, extravagant artificiality; the Batwing is merely chintzy. The Joker is able to shoot down Batman's plane with a handgun, and the terrible part is that it actually seems plausible.

Years after his involvement with the Batman series, Tim Burton infamously asserted that he'd "never read a comic book." But his Batman is much more like a comic book than Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight. Its plot is negligible and, for the most part, silly, especially the Joker's scheme to poison hair and skin products. And because the story is insignificant, Burton is able to treat it with jaunty glibness. The screenplay is underwritten, as virtually every critic has noted. After it has disposed of Batman's and the Joker's origin stories, it has trouble finding an interesting direction, and it meanders through a few half-hearted diversions, like Bruce Wayne's romance with Vicki Vale, before pulling together for its conclusion. Michael Keaton is one of the best Bruce Waynes -- his eccentric mannerisms make you want to believe in this weird character -- but we don't get to know him well enough. This is a very slight movie and, for all its macabre atmosphere, not very serious. The strange thing is that, stripped of the details, Batman reminds me how appealing its basic concept is -- a lonely, nocturnal avenger, protecting his apocalyptically grim city from destruction -- and makes me more grateful to Nolan for fleshing it out into the rich tragedy it ought to be.

As the Joker, Nicholson doesn't have nearly as much to work with as Ledger did. He's stripped of his mystery -- who ever wanted to know where a clown came from? -- by the banal backstory assigned to him (he was dropped in a vat of disfiguring chemicals), and he doesn't get any really memorable dialogue -- just a few semi-witty throwaway jokes. His interactions with Batman are rare, brief, and disappointing. Even the makeup fails him; his stiff, deformed grin is not frightening, as Ledger's wounds were; it's simply off-putting, like a bad drawing. And just as Batman depends here too much on campy gadgets, the Joker comes equipped with an array of kitschy comic gizmos, including a joy buzzer that fries its victims into cheesy Mars Attacks aliens. Nicholson's Joker is mostly flair; the character has no substance, and Nicholson doesn't seem to exert himself to bring any to him. Nevertheless, he seems delighted with himself, and he spends a great deal of the movie dancing (poorly) to Prince's soundtrack. Even in the scenes without Prince, he prances about as if on the verge of waltzing. Kael is right when she complains that "there's no pain in Nicholson. The Joker may look a little like Olivier as the John Osborne vaudevillian, but he isn't human: he's all entertainer, a glinting-eyed cartoon -- he's still springing gags after he's dead. This interpretation is too mechanical to be fully satisfying. And is Nicholson entertainer enough? He doesn't show the physical elegance and inventiveness we may hope for."

Batman isn't all bad. The music, with Danny Elfman's score and Prince's songs, is fun, and Jack Palance has an amusing cameo as a mob boss. As the love interest, Kim Basinger doesn't get to do much, but she's more agreeable than Maggie Gyllenhaal. Burton's movie is passable entertainment, and it has none of the bloated absurdity of Joel Schumacher's sequels, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. But, to see where Batman suffers in comparison to The Dark Knight, compare, for instance, its pallid Alfred (Michael Gough) to Michael Caine's shrewd, funny version. Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren's script just isn't good enough.

So where is the lush, sinister fantasy I recall? I've decided that it must be Batman Returns, Burton's follow-up, which critics deemed too bleak. I'll watch it again and let you know what I think.

September 27, 2008

What can I say about the man who was perhaps the best of all movie stars? Paul Newman had the skill of a dedicated thespian and the charisma of a matinee idol, and for half a century he was consistently excellent in a way that few performers ever have been. There's not another actor with more roles that one cannot even visualize someone else playing: My favorite is Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, but we also have Newman's indelible performancesin Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Slap Shot, The Verdict, and Nobody's Fool. His screen presence was irresistibly amiable, with roguish bonhomie and a light comic touch, but he was capable too of evincing powerful emotions, much like his peers Marlon Brando and James Dean from New York's Actors Studio were. Yet Newman didn't seem caged by technique as they often did. He gave an impression of effortlessness on screen.

Obituaries can be read here, here, and here. Rest in peace, Paul Newman.

September 26, 2008

Neil LaBute's movies are designed to make you feel worse about the world. In this, he's very skillful. Set in a tasteful, upper middle-class landscape populated largely by educated, articulate professionals, his films are not overtly gloomy, but a toxic aura of tension and bitterness pervades them. In The Shape of Things, Your Friends & Neighbors, and In the Company of Men, issues of gender, politics, race, status, and aesthetics become fearsome boundaries that preclude anyone from achieving an intimate connection with another human being. Friends and lovers interact on a superficially pleasant level, yet they remain divided by longstanding resentments that, for each character, live in some deep, wounded part of the personality that is inaccessible to outsiders and wants retribution. No one can exit the private cell of his hostilities, injuries, and desires. These are, I think, the loneliest movies I've ever seen.

But there is also another Neil LaBute, who makes competent mainstream fare like Nurse Betty and Possession -- watchable, unexceptionable films upon which he left no noticeable stamp of his own. LaBute's first attempt to meld his mainstream ambitions with his personal vision was The Wicker Man, a horror remake so steeped in absurdity that one would have to be generous to call it a failure. In fact, it's one of the most ridiculous movies ever made, with an ending whose grotesque instantiation of LaBute's earlier gender wars has Nicolas Cage punching more than one woman in the face (once while dressed as a bear).

In LaBute's latest effort, Lakeview Terrace, the director again assays to place his own obsessions in the context of a genre film -- this time, a thriller whose B-movie premise features a psychotic neighbor terrorizing the young couple that buys the house next door. It's the sort of plot I know I saw multiple times before the age of 10 in movies so undistinguished that I can't recall any of their titles. The trailer for Lakeview Terrace evokes them unmistakably, and their half-remembered badness provokes a small shiver whenever I see it. It does little to inspire confidence that this rehash will be any better than The Wicker Man. Yet, as it turns out, Lakeview Terrace is an arresting, intelligent drama. It is unpleasant in all the right ways.

The movie takes place in an upscale suburban cul-de-sac near Los Angeles. Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) lives here. Abel is a widower whom the opening scenes show to be a strict but caring father to his adolescent daughter and preteen son. But when a white man (Patrick Wilson, who, in a role less showy than Jackson's, gives a more nuanced performance) and his black wife (Kerry Washington) move into the neighborhood, the interracial couple unwittingly triggers a buried malevolence in Abel, who does everything in his power to drive them away -- from spoiling their housewarming party to slashing their car's tires. Chris and Lisa are thrilled to own their first home, and they give Abel, in whom they sense animosity from the start, the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible, but they soon feel compelled to retaliate. There seems, however, to be little they can do: Abel is a police officer.

This all sounds fairly routine, but it's staged effectively, as the horror of Chris and Lisa's situation gradually reveals itself. It's surprising, moreover, how well this plot functions to dramatize subjects beyond the scope of a traditional thriller. LaBute handles these expertly. He is often accused of being deliberately inflammatory, and his approach to the film's racial issue here indeed seems crafted to challenge Hollywood's conventions. Among the important characters, the only seriously intolerant ones are blacks: Both Abel and Lisa's father disapprove of Chris on the basis of his color. There is an unwritten rule that, in movies about racism, the whites must be guiltier than the blacks. This, after all, makes sense: Whites are the guilty ones. The role-reversal in Lakeview Terrace is, for this reason, bound to anger some viewers and perplex others. But the director is not interested only in pushing buttons. As a racist white man, Abel might have been too familiar, too easy to write off as another limp cautionary example. LaBute and his screenwriters have created complex characters whose reality transcends questions of political correctness.

Of course, Abel is indisputably the villain here. Samuel L. Jackson yells and glowers with the sort of hammy authority only he can muster. Yet, though the character is essentially pulpy, his behavior is remarkably comprehensible. Abel has a stringent code of conduct, and he always believes he is right. LaBute reveals how his upbringing and occupation have put him in an environment whose anarchy has led him to believe that he is the only man in the world who has principles and that he must enforce them by any means necessary. The pressures of his work have overwhelmed his morals while cementing his belief in their unassailability. This, too, perhaps comes from lesser films about cops (in the movies, nothing is more likely to corrupt you than employment with the LAPD -- see Training Day and Dark Blue), but it's believable in the same way that the misogynists in LaBute's prior movies were: We've seen this kind of self-justifying rage in the real world. It pollutes everything around it.

Chris, meanwhile, is a sensible, unassuming, comparatively innocent liberal, whose manhood is repeatedly called into question. Every word Abel addresses to him sounds like a challenge. Chris's father-in-law wonders aloud whether he's capable of protecting a family. Lisa, whom Chris seems to love, becomes pregnant, and it's clear that he's not ready to be a father. Like unassertive Howard from In the Company of Men, he is goaded by forces stronger than he into discovering himself. How much does he actually love his wife? Can he escape the Abel's poisonous anger, or does he harbor his own indignation? When he's faced with violence, how does he react? The situation recalls Straw Dogs, in which Dustin Hoffman's milquetoast was also forced into action, but the question of masculinity was less complicated to Peckinpah than it is to LaBute, whose tough guys are obviously confused and usually pathetic.

Lakeview Terrace was scripted by David Loughery and Howard Korder, but certain lines sound as though they must have come from LaBute: for example, Chris's racist friend's dialogue and, later, Chris's own response to one of his father-in-law's insults. At one point, Abel's crass, swaggering cop friends throw a bachelor party where Chad from In the Company of Men would fit right in.

Only in its conclusion does Lakeview Terrace fall short. A wildfire rages in the hills behind the cul-de-sac, and its smoke threatens to envelop the neighborhood, just as the poisonous cloud that Abel has cast over the neighborhood seems on the verge of consuming Chris and Lisa's marriage. Here, the story requires a departure from the form which has, so far, served successfully to tell it. In a typical thriller, everything is OK once the villain is vanquished; here, Abel unearths tensions that extend beyond himself. To dispose of these, we need more than a
display of physical courage and a reaffirmation of love.
The easy solution doesn't suffice.

September 25, 2008

The teaser trailer for Biggie's biopic, Notorious (starring Cary Grant as the slain rapper), was released two days ago. Like Biggie's music, it's a little dull. But Tupac (played by someone who doesn't really look like Tupac) is in it for a millisecond, too!

A new preview for another biopic, Oliver Stone's W, appeared today. Does this actually look kind of good, or is it just that I like the Talking Heads too much to make a level-headed judgment?

September 24, 2008

yellow in the after-harvest sun before the cold plow turns it all over

into never. I didn't know I would enter this music

that translates the world back into dirt fields that have always called to me

as if I were a thing come from the dirt, like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled and unraveling strangeness.

* * *

"When Autumn Came"by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:it stripped them down to the skin,left their ebony bodies naked.It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,scattered them over the ground.Anyone could trample them out of shapeundisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreamswere exiled from their song,each voice torn out of its throat.They dropped into the dusteven before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.Bless these withered bodieswith the passion of your resurrection;make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.Let one bird sing.

* * *

"Merry Autumn"by Paul Laurence Dunbar

It's all a farce,—these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o'er field and dell, Because the year is dying.

Such principles are most absurd,— I care not who first taught 'em; There's nothing known to beast or bird To make a solemn autumn.

In solemn times, when grief holds sway With countenance distressing, You'll note the more of black and gray Will then be used in dressing.

Now purple tints are all around; The sky is blue and mellow; And e'en the grasses turn the ground From modest green to yellow.

The seed burrs all with laughter crack On featherweed and jimson; And leaves that should be dressed in black Are all decked out in crimson.

A butterfly goes winging by; A singing bird comes after; And Nature, all from earth to sky, Is bubbling o'er with laughter.

The ripples wimple on the rills, Like sparkling little lasses; The sunlight runs along the hills, And laughs among the grasses.

The earth is just so full of fun It really can't contain it; And streams of mirth so freely run The heavens seem to rain it.

Don't talk to me of solemn days In autumn's time of splendor, Because the sun shows fewer rays, And these grow slant and slender.

Why, it's the climax of the year,— The highest time of living!— Till naturally its bursting cheer Just melts into thanksgiving.

September 21, 2008

• Jude Law may play Watson in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, in which Robert Downey Jr. is set to star. Wait -- Robert Downey Jr. is going to play Sherlock Holmes? Bro, that sounds awesome! Why didn't I hear about it when that was announced? Who the hell cares about Jude Law? Not me!

• This is the longest Philip Roth profile I've ever seen. It's got to be the last one until his next novel, right?

• Stephen Chow, a really good director whom I suddenly realize I haven't thought about once in the past three years, will direct Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's big-screen adaptation of The Green Hornet, with Rogen as the title character and Chow as Kato. This might be exciting if I knew what the hell The Green Hornet was. I know Bruce Lee was on the TV show. Was the main character a fat, curly-haired stoner? Are there more than ten people who have both heard of Seth Rogen and seen The Green Hornet on TV?